‘Right. I’m afraid I disagree,’ said Louise, her hands now placed firmly on her hips. ‘This was her first ever seizure and there’s something not right. She’s disappeared within herself. I think she’s in pain. Can you call a more senior doctor? Maybe a neurologist? Is there one on shift?’
The nurse sighed.
‘Mrs Willow, I really don’t think—’
‘Please?’ Louise’s tone and expression proved persuasive. The nurse paged the senior doctor on call and Louise went back into Patience’s room to wait. She sat down next to the bed and took hold of her daughter’s hand.
‘Patience, my love?’ Her voice was so soft, she was almost whispering. ‘Patience… It’s Mummy. I know you’re in there, somewhere. I think you’re in pain. Am I right?’ Louise waited for a squeeze of her hand, even though she knew that it would never come. Patience couldn’t control her hands. And yet, she always waited. Just in case. She realised she had spent almost all of Patience’s life waiting for a miracle.
‘I’m so sorry I didn’t come last night. I didn’t want you to be here, all alone. Hospitals are scary, I know that. But they didn’t tell me, Patience, they didn’t tell me. But I’m here now – and I promise I won’t leave you.’
She stood up and leaned over her daughter once more. Patience was still staring blankly into space, her eyes unfocussed, like an infant about to succumb to sleep. Louise planted a kiss on her forehead and smiled at her again, even though she knew that Patience was in no mood to give her one in return.
Turning around, she glanced at the clock, and realised she should be on her way to her interview by now. To distract herself from both her daughter’s pain and her apparent unemployability, she walked over to the room’s small window, which overlooked a tiny square. It was cast into shadow for much of the day by the wards and consulting rooms surrounding it but several patients – identifiable by the hospital gowns that were poking out from beneath their coats – were sitting on a garden bench, smoking. One was still attached to a drip. Imagine if your own actions were responsible for your disease, she thought; imagine living with that guilt. It was bad enough living with something that people insisted you could never have prevented.
Louise turned away and returned to her chair. Noticing that Patience appeared to have dropped off to sleep, she switched on the small TV beside the bed and flicked through the daytime television options.
It was a fruitless search. No programme was engaging enough to numb her pain. She turned the TV off in disgust, stood up abruptly and began to pace around the room, tracing a crescent moon on the lino as she skirted purposefully around the bed, back and forth, back and forth. A few minutes and many fruitless steps later, she was interrupted at the cusp of the moon’s shadow.
‘Mrs Willow? They tell me you want to see me.’
Louise looked up to see a short, balding man in his late forties standing in front of her, his white coat stained with what looked like juice, but it may have been blood.
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, standing up. ‘Are you a neurologist?’
‘I’m sorry, no. But I’m a consultant in A & E. We saw Patience there last night.’
‘Right. Well, my daughter is in a lot of pain – and the thing is, Dr…?’
‘Ian. Call me Ian.’
‘The thing is, Ian, you don’t seem to be doing anything about it.’
‘Mrs Willow, I understand you’re upset.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It’s a lot to take in,’ he continued, after a pause, ‘but I’ve had a good look at Patience and I think she’s fine. She’s recovering from the seizure very well. We’re still not sure why she had it. It’s possible—’
‘She’s not fine!’ Louise snapped. ‘I can tell. I know I don’t have a medical degree, but I have been her mother for thirty years, and you’re just going to have to take my word for it. You need to do something to help her, please. What painkillers can you give her?’
‘You can tell?’ There was obvious reservation in his voice. He thought she was nuts, clearly. People generally assumed that being non-verbal meant that Patience was a closed book, but over the years, she had developed an instinct about how she was feeling. It wasn’t foolproof and she’d give anything to talk to her daughter properly, but most of the time, she knew when something was wrong. The powerlessness and guilt that came with not knowing exactly what was wrong gnawed away at her, however.
‘Yes, I just know. Just one look at her tells me she’s extremely uncomfortable. I don’t think she’s breathing right, either. I can’t tell you exactly where the pain is, Ian, because of course I’m not psychic and I’m not a doctor. But I’m her mother and I’m telling you that she’s hurting, Ian, and I want you to help her.’
‘OK, Mrs Willow, fair enough. I’ll chase up her test results, order some more and ask the nurses to start giving her some pain relief. It can’t hurt.’
Louise began to breathe more easily. She managed to mutter a thank you before she collapsed back into the chair beside Patience’s bed.
‘It’s going to be OK, Patience,’ she said. ‘Mummy is here. Mummy is going to make sure you feel better. Don’t you worry.’ Louise took her daughter’s hand again and closed her eyes. Her headache was receding now, but exhaustion, her constant companion, was not.
*
Jayne found Louise sleeping, her head lolling towards her chest, when she came in a few hours later to do her observations. She thought of waking her to let her know about the X-ray, the one that showed Patience had broken her collarbone. But she looked so clearly in need of rest, that she left it for the duty doctor to explain on his afternoon rounds.
3
Eliza
July
Eliza cried as she grappled with her keys and wrestled with the lock, her fingers refusing to cooperate. In fact, she’d been crying for hours, but her sobs rose to a crescendo as she finally pushed open the door to the flat, only to hear the telltale chime of the other set, which were lying on the tiled floor of the entrance hall.
The air in the flat was dense, smelling of baked dust. She ran through to the lounge, opened the sash window and leaned out, hoping that the fresher air would calm her. But it was a close, humid evening, one of those nights in London where everyone seemed to be having a barbecue or a drinks party, and the distant sounds of kids playing and adults laughing turned out to be more than she could bear. So, still sobbing her big, uncontainable tears, she swung back into the room, and delayed opening her eyes for a second or two, knowing what was to come.
When she did look, it was no surprise to find that books were set at jaunty angles on the shelves, leaning into each other as if embarrassed by their depleted numbers. The CD shelf had been decimated, and her modest collection from her uni years – Coldplay, Keane, Oasis – were lying like islands amongst a sea of scratched paint. He’d loved music and had amassed a huge CD collection. ‘The sound quality is so much better than downloads,’ he’d always explain, repeatedly, to whoever would listen.
She began a mental inventory of everything else that was missing. Several framed photographs had vanished from the mantelpiece and, in the main bedroom, there was a circle of clean surface on her bedside table surrounded by dust, a reminder of the alarm clock that had stood there only this morning. The wardrobe doors were partially open and she could see that she now had plenty of room for her ‘unnecessarily large’ collection of clothes. That was another thing he had liked to say to her, regularly.
She moved into the small galley kitchen and opened the cupboards. She had been left with a sum total of four plates, one mug, some chipped water glasses, and the set of blue wine glasses they’d been given for Christmas that she suspected he’d never liked. There was no sign of the kettle or the toaster. Cereal for breakfast tomorrow then, she thought.
Then she noticed the note on the counter, propped up against the tiled walls with a broken egg cup. It was written on standard A4 lined writing paper, ripped from a pad they always kept for shopping lists and notes for the cle
aner. The handwriting was precise, tidy. Like him. It read: I’m sorry. Take care of yourself x
That kiss at the end simply took the piss, she thought. Resisting the urge to rip it up, she grabbed it and threw herself down onto the sofa, rereading it until its contents began to swim in front of her eyes. What on earth was the point in saying sorry? How could any words be appropriate at all?
She looked down at the cluster of diamonds currently decorating the third finger of her left hand. He had chosen it alone, insisting that it was traditional to do things that way. She had not argued, even though she would have preferred a solitaire. Even so, it would be strange, taking it off. She had only ever done that to wash it, to get rid of the London dust that collected among its constellation of tiny stars.
She wondered where he was right now. Most likely, cosy in the flat in Oxford they had chosen together, just as a stopgap – or so she had thought. What an idiot she was! Or was he out with his mates, elated after moving everything he owned (or, to be more specific, the stuff that he’d liked) out of the flat he had barely lived in for months? He’d be overjoyed too, now that he no longer had to put up with her, the gigantic failure in life that she was proving to be.
Eliza thought then about all of the people who needed to be told; almost a hundred people who had just been sent an expensive ivory card, embossed with the image of a lily, with the text printed in one of those curly-wurly fonts, made to look like calligraphy.
She knew that most of the people on the guest list were still weighing up whether they could afford to attend the event next summer; they’d only had a few responses so far. She was certain, however, that no one doubted it would go ahead. After all, they’d been together for so long and they were both in the latter part of their thirties – it was time to knuckle down and start a family now, right? Everyone thought they were a solid couple, about to have 2.4 children, destined to walk along Southend pier on a tandem Zimmer frame. How could she explain that, behind that perfect façade that they’d had for more than a decade, things had gone horribly rotten, horribly wrong?
Oh fuck! She could not – would not – tell her mother.
‘Oh goodness, I’d almost given up on you two getting married.’
That comment from her mum had really smarted. She would never forget it. It had seemed to Eliza that Louise had embraced her future son-in-law with more enthusiasm for her elder daughter’s choices than she had ever previously managed. They had waited seventeen years for him to propose, after all. And the obvious happiness that had followed their announcement – the joy her mum had shown in the planning, in the shopping, in the deciding over the past few months – she was about to take all of that away, wasn’t she? She was going to have to take the source of her mother’s only happiness away.
Ed was everything that a son-in-law should be, she thought, and that made it so much worse. He showed every sign of progressing up the career ladder, right to the top. His ambition was a great counterbalance for her distinct lack of it. Eliza knew that she was not destined for success. But she had been destined to become the power behind his throne, however; the strong woman backing up her man.
Had been. Had.
She fished out her phone from her handbag and turned it on. She had ten missed calls and several voicemails. She’d turned the ringer off last night after he had stormed off. He’d said he’d call her to talk about it when she had calmed down, and, well, she hadn’t quite got there yet.
This radio silence was a complete about-turn because for almost two decades, he had been pretty much the only person she called. When she got a new job, she called him. When she saw someone wearing a terrible outfit on the street, she called him. When her acidic boss said something crass and hurtful (as she often did), she called him, and he always made her feel better. And now she had the ultimate emotional catastrophe on her hands – and no one to call.
Speaking of her boss – work today had been a complete washout. She still wasn’t sure why she had gone in at all, except that calling in sick would have meant sticking around to watch their home being decimated. She hadn’t trusted herself to maintain her dignity while he set about dismantling their life in front of her.
She had managed to get her act together enough to sit through a client meeting and to induct a new work-experience girl, but by mid-morning she had become robotic and rudderless. And Jenny had noticed. She was so bloody on top of things, Jenny, and of course she could see that Eliza wasn’t. She had asked her if something was up when they were queuing together for a coffee; Eliza’s carefully formed poker face had crumpled and she had run to the toilet for sanctuary. Her annual appraisal was coming up, and she knew now that it wasn’t going to be stellar, because crying in the office meant you were weak. She knew this was Jenny’s opinion because she had said something similar to her about Aggie, a colleague who’d recently come back to work after failed fertility treatment.
Eliza got back up off the sofa and returned to the kitchen and opened a cupboard, taking one of the chipped glasses out. After a quick glance in the fridge she reached inside and pulled out pretty much the only thing left – a half-empty bottle of gin – and poured herself an extremely generous measure. Then, having unearthed a warm and almost flat bottle of tonic from the back of a cupboard, she went back to the window and sat down once more. She drank the mixture slowly, hoping the tear-induced hiccups would subside before she had to make the inevitable call to set off the bush telegraph.
In the distance she could see trains heading south from Victoria to Clapham Junction, the occasional flash as they switched tracks. There were so many perfectly ordinary lives out there, just beyond her window. But, inside, her own little existence had just become extraordinary. Extraordinarily bad, that is.
Her phone rang. It was the first contact she’d had from the outside world since she’d left the office. She snatched it up.
‘Ed?’
‘Eliza? It’s not Ed, it’s Mum.’
A deep breath. She swallowed hard, and tried to sound calm. Happy. Engaged.
‘Oh, hi. How are things?’ she said, sitting back into the sofa in preparation for her mother’s habitual lengthy monologue about her sister, her father, and a new favourite, their ‘difficult finances’, which she suspected was a hint about the cost of the wedding. Oh well, she thought, that’s one less thing for her to worry about now.
‘Eliza, I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,’ her mother said. ‘Why don’t you answer your phone? You’ve got to come! It’s Patience.’
4
Patience
July
Jesus, woman, can you please stop stabbing me with that bloody needle.
One of the nurses – KatyJayneSamEmma (I’ve given up, they are all blending into one now) – is making a hatchet job of trying to get a line into my right hand. My veins are feeble and minuscule – it’s one of the crosses people like me have to bear – and she’s having difficulties finding a vein at all. But instead of admitting defeat, she’s absolutely going for it, puncturing my skin with wild abandon, playing a numbers game.
‘I’m sorry, Patience… almost done.’
Ouch bloody ouch, woman. Stop lying to me and find someone who can actually do it.
‘Actually, do you know what? Your poor hand has had enough of me. I’ll call a doctor and see if they have more luck. OK?’
I don’t know who she’s expecting a reply from, but actually, it’s nice that she’s trying. Most people don’t because I can’t respond and they assume, therefore, that I’m not really there. To the vast majority of folk, you see, I’m a ghost. I can be in a room, right there in front of somebody, and they don’t see me at all. I am privy to intimate conversations, erotic confessions, devastating truths. And when I’m not being invisible, I get far too much attention. People who accompany me get stared at.
On the plus side of things, I’m also a handy plus one. I get people better seats at the theatre, more convenient parking and much better service at Disney. Thes
e are not things people have told me, by the way. These are things I’ve worked out for myself. I’ve had a lot of time to do it. Thirty years, so far; three decades of ever-decreasing muscles, fruitless operations, myriad different personalities sitting patiently in front of me, spooning in mashed-up beige food, and then washing my scar-littered body in a hospital-grade bath with a door.
I’m not unhappy, though, despite it all. The thing is, being forced to sit down for almost my whole life has had an incredible side effect. Unlike ‘normal’ folk (and frankly, what is normal?), I have no choice but to properly appreciate the joy that surrounds me. And soaking up all of this joy means that I laugh a lot. I think people around me take that to mean that I’m a bit simple, but actually, it’s the opposite. I’m pretty complicated. As I say, I see everything, and I know what it all means, too. I’ve joined up all the dots. I know what Eliza did. And I know what Dad is hiding, too. But I’ll never tell. Not because I’m a super-trustworthy person; I’m pretty certain that I’m the gossipy sort. It’s just that I can’t talk, can I? So I’ll never be able to pass on any secrets, no matter how juicy they might be.
So having assessed the status quo, as it were – my involuntary silence, my extensive disabilities – you might wonder why I’m still here, the pathetic excuse for a ghost that I am.
Two reasons. Mum and Dad’s devotion is the reason I’m still alive, no question. Their love has kept me well and I want to pay them back by sticking around. It’s a very simple exchange.
And then there’s the time-shifting. I’m not claiming to be a time traveller, I’ll leave that to the great Doctor, but I do have the ability to drop in and out of consciousness at will. This means I’m never bored, never lonely. I just disappear inside myself somewhere, into a world where my arms and legs work brilliantly and, even more astonishingly, I have a voice.
Patience Page 2